Conscience & Consciousness

The other day I was reflecting on words that reflect my own concept of compassionate conscience - a way of approach an empathic ethic that seeks to be benevolent from a spirit of union with all life and an innate appreciation for the feelings, worth and sacredness of other individuals, groups, ecosystems and so forth throughout creation.

Guilt is a low vibe emotion that tends not to make us kinder, tends not to make us better, and is often used to control people.

Guilt is useless, yet so often it is where people get stuck, and what people try to use to get others to give them what they really want - which is usually compassionate understanding with acknowledgment and a total about face of behavior. We want them to understand what they did that contributed to our hurt, and we want them to stop doing it. If it really hurt, we may want them to contribute to helping us heal or to give what we went through some kind of silver lining. If we are on the receiving end of a hurt, we cannot wait for others to repent to heal, because most often they don’t know what they did because guilt keeps them in denial, suppressing their consciousness of the impact on us. A few people revel on causing harm, but most have learned it from being brutalized. My perception is very very few people innately take pleasure in causing pain and those people are evil. Inverted. Their 180 is a total about face of their actual self. The 180 of evil is live.

People who suppress guilt but feel guilty deep down are usually the biggest narcissists. People who can have self-compassion are much more able to mend and make amends because they are free from self-loathing and able to attend to the other if they have inadvertently, or in a moment they now regret, hurt another being. When people feel fundamentally worthy, they are much more able to admit mistakes. When we feel worthy we are much more able to be compassionate with ourselves - and with others on their journeys.

When we become forgiving of ourselves, we become forgiving of others more easily.

We may learn that it is possible to regret how we handled something from a human vantage point and see that it had a higher design, either karmic or just in terms of allowing something to play out that is part of a larger divine unfoldment that needed us or someone else to have that experience for some reason we may or may not understand from our current vantage. It may be preparing them or us for our service.

from Etymology.net

I love this definition of conscience above because it is an intimate one - through union/encounter, it knows in a way that allows it to distinguish or evaluate - and to discern by dividing/separating or cutting - through oneness with the experience it is able to discern, parse, and see what is what is what - for example, what is ours, what is theirs, what is ancestral, what may be collective or just being human but not a function of malevolence or even doing something wrong, but just perhaps something uncomfortable or that hasn’t yet developed skillfulness in its expression. and so on.

The word contrition is interesting because vibrationally to me if feels more heart-centered than guilt, but it still connotes a brokenness, that while appropriate to someone who has caused grave harm, (within relative reality) may not be appropriate for someone who accidentally hurt someone else’s feelings or misstepped or had a grumpy tone or otherwise made errors that were experienced as painful but weren’t big crimes, huge moral failures or atrocities. You can make an innocent mistake and it can still have grave consequences. Your compassion should meet the level of suffering the other experiences, but that doesn’t mean what you did was as horrible as the way they feel. Experiences aren’t equal like that. People have died from another’s driving error, while other drivers have made worse mistakes without so much as a ticket, and the same is true for our relationships, our emotional lives and the impacts we have on those we touch online or offline.